Which video card is the best?

grpruett

I had 8 genesis male 2 characters in a scene and the rendering seem to come to a complete halt at the genesis characters. Could it be my video card that is causing the rendering to stop and hang up?

My system is Window 7 home premium. 64-bit
Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4130 CPU @ 3.40GHZ
Installed RAM is 8GB
My video card is NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS

XoechZ

I dare to say no!
3Delight (the render engine inside DAZ Studio) is a pure CPU renderer. That means it only uses your CPU and RAM for rendering and not your video card.
So it does not cause your problems. When DAZ Studio hangs or crashes during rendering it is mostly the fault of your RAM (not enough), your CPU (maybe overheating) or your PSU (too weak).

On the other side it could be that you do not have any hardware problems at all!
How is your scene set up? How many lights do you use? Which kind of lighning?
Sometimes, when using a lot of SSS and UberEnvironment lights, the renderer needs to do a lot of calculations and the render takes a long long time.

Atticus Bones

3Delight uses CPU. The video card only really effects real-time manipulation in your viewport, unless of course you're using a GPU based render like LuxRender (OpenCL) or Octane (Cuda). Upgrading your processor would enable you to process more data, but (like most things in life) you'd get more bang for your buck by simply installing more RAM. Increasing the RAM is going to reduce your system's need for virtual memory and should speed up your renders.

Mattymanx

Gerald, can you please post a screen shot of your advanced render settings? And a screen shot of your viewport showing the scene?

When it comes to things like transparent surfaces, reflections, shadows and ambient occlusion to name but a few, it takes more time for the render engine to process them due to all the extra calculations. So we have to learn to adjust our render settings plus surface settings and lights to balance quality and speed.

Thank you

grpruett

I tried to get the best screenshot that would display the most information.

barbult

Do any of your characters use the Age of Armour (AOA) Subsurface Shader on their skin? As soon as the render reaches one of those skins, it will pause and do lots of calculations. I've had it stop for 16 minutes doing that. Then it starts rendering again at normal speed. If you are using that shader, just wait it out. I'm not sure if having 8 characters with that shader would take 8 times as long for the initial calculations or not.

Herald of Fire

geraldpruett said:

I tried to get the best screenshot that would display the most information.

That's quite a few figures for a mere 8Gb RAM. My first guess would be that you're running out of memory during rendering. In this instance I would recommend rendering the fighting duo's separately and then layering them over one another in an external program such as Photoshop or Gimp. That way you can keep the scene, but make things a lot easier on your processing.

nDelphi

HeraldOfFire said:

geraldpruett said:

I tried to get the best screenshot that would display the most information.

That's quite a few figures for a mere 8Gb RAM. My first guess would be that you're running out of memory during rendering. In this instance I would recommend rendering the fighting duo's separately and then layering them over one another in an external program such as Photoshop or Gimp. That way you can keep the scene, but make things a lot easier on your processing.

Another thing you could do is not have DAZ Studio running during the rendering by using the standalone 3Delight renderer. You will have more memory for rendering. But this will depend on how adventurous you feel.

HOW to use 3Delight Stand Alone Render Engine (tutorial)

I used the standalone 3Delight to render the most resource hogging scene I have ever put together, and I rendered huge dimensions, in the 10,000 x 5625 image sizes, saved as 60 to 70 megs tiff images. My computer too only has 8 gigabytes of memory.

Guardian of Liberty scene

But before you even attempt it, use the task manager to check the memory usage, if you are pushing the limits, say 80% just by having the scene opened in DAZ Studio then you might have problems even with the standalone 3Delight renderer as it too will bog down using cache memory. You will just have to try it and see.

Jaderail

I also believe you are running out of RAM for the render. I'm on a 64Gb Ram PC and 8 Genesis figures, clothing, hair, props and a setting will even tax my system to some extent. I also suggest that for this image you learn to work in layers. It is not hard and can even be faster if you have a shadow catcher to use instead of just trying to render many files and then match the needed parts. I would suggest the free to make Shader Builer/Mixer Shadow catcher explained in the Freepozatory threads except I have had some issues with it depending on the scene. The DAZ Studio version of pwCatch from the pwShaders is what I would suggest, it has never failed me and offers more options than the free to make shadow catcher.

Anyway, you can do the render, it will just take more set up and work than a single full render. PS. I like the idea of your render.

grpruett

Thanks for the suggestions.

Mattymanx

If any of the figures in the scene are using HD morphs, I would take them out and maybe set each figure to standard resolution (on the parameters tab). Make sure subdivision for the figures is set to 1 as well.